The need for ensuring food safety for human consumption, without the deterioration in nutritional, functional, and sensory characteristics, has been creating an increasing worldwide interest in innovative strategies and emerging technologies for food preservation. These promising approaches including physical, chemical, and biological methods have been advanced by both industry and academia, which could significantly contribute to the production of microbiologically and/or chemically safe foods with a high quality. Furthermore, they have been proceeding toward providing shorter processing time, reduced operational cost, or being environmentally-friendly compared to the conventional food-processing methods, eventually benefiting the food industry.

In response to these trends, this special issue aims to focus on recent advances in the promising approaches and deals with case studies on their applications to the food industry. This will include not only basic science but also applied research. It will attempt to cover review articles as well as highly original research papers on these topics, demonstrating both technical advances and practical utilizations.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Innovative and emerging techniques to prevent foods from microbial contaminations and/or chemical hazards
• Synthesis and characterization of a novel food additive to control hazardous elements in foods
• Investigations on biomarkers or biosensors which could detect microbial and/or chemical contaminants in foods
• Food packaging to avoid chemical deterioration and/or microbial biodegradation
• Migration studies to control processing/packaging-induced contaminants
• Modeling of experimental devices for the removal of contaminants in foods